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Google says it has ‘no current plans regarding Bitcoin’

A popular Reddit submission today suggested Google’s payment team was looking to incorporate Bitcoin, naturally sparking a lot of excitement in the virtual currency community. We reached out to Google regarding the claim and learned that it was indeed false.

“As we continue to work on Google Wallet, we’re grateful for a very wide range of suggestions,” a Google spokesperson told TNW. “While we’re keen to actively engage with Wallet users to help inform and shape the product, there’s no change to our position: we have no current plans regarding Bitcoin.”

In other words, it was too good to be true. The Reddit submission was titled “Google confirms their payments team is working to incorporate bitcoin.” by a user who calls themselves JasonBored. The individual had allegedly emailed Vic Gundotra, Google’s Senior Vice President of Social, to ask him whether the company was looking to adopt Bitcoin.

Here is the important part: “We are working in the payments team to figure out how to incorporate bitcoin into our plans.” Assuming this statement did indeed come from Ramaswamy, it would suggest Google was getting ready to support the virtual currency.

Our statement from Google says otherwise. The company may indeed be looking into Bitcoin, but it’s not ready to publicly back it in any way.

Nevertheless, JasonBored says Ariel Bardin, Google’s Vice President of Payments, asked him to start a Google Moderator post and pose the question “What would I want Google to do with bitcoin?” Even if all his communications with Google never happened (it’s likely they actually did), something tells us that Google will pay attention to the responses: hundreds of people have already made over 250 suggestions at the time of this article’s publication.

Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, including Ars Technica, Neowin, TechSpot, ZDNet, and CNET. Stay in touch via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.